


Roof of the Wave

by mugwort_and_myrrh



Series: The Fray Will Well Become Me [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Magic, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Avengers (2012), Solitary Confinement, sorcery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-06 09:24:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13408266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mugwort_and_myrrh/pseuds/mugwort_and_myrrh
Summary: His name is Steven Grant Rogers. His mother and father were Sarah and Ulfadhir. He is a sorcerer and a soldier and a captain in the U.S. Army, a Howling Commando. There is a war on, and—Sometimes he holds himself together long enough that he remembers putting the Valkyrie down in the water.He can hear the moan of metal shifting under the changing pressure of ice and gravity, water pressure, and beyond that he hears the aching slow groan and crack of the ice shifting, grinding. Changing shape as slow and ponderous as a geological age coming on.As it turns out—as Stevie has gotta learn the hard way—death is not the end when your blood and bones are more’n half sorcery by weight. There is a long winter ahead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here begins part two of The Fray Will Well Become Me, also known as the Magic Pixie Dream Steve ‘verse. To everyone coming through from The Truth May Vary: welcome back, much love, and strap your asses in.
> 
> Anyone who hasn’t read The Truth May Vary and has stumbled in here anyway: this is gonna be confusing as shit, and while I don’t wanna tell you how to live your life you may want to hit the series link and read part one first. Or, you know, you do you, I guess. Welcome aboard regardless!
> 
> Once again, showers of love and rose petals and confetti to my alpha and beta readers, who’ve been ride-or-die with me the whole way through the 140,000-plus words of part one and then for some reason all agreed to keep going into part two. Chantelle, Liz, Julie and Jacqui: Queens of my Heart.

It takes some time—a day, a week, a decade—before Steve realises he's not dead.

This is the world, as he knows it:

It's pitch dark. He's not looking with human eyes but even so it's fucking dark as ink, and he's only got snatches of visual input—the warped and buckled shapes of metal arching around him, shot through with the crystal sharp lines of ice, ice through everything, into everything, every corner of the _Valkyrie_ , every particle of his being—

He can hear the moan of metal shifting under the changing pressure of ice and gravity, water pressure, and beyond that—bigger than that—he hears the aching slow groan and crack of the ice shifting, grinding. Changing shape as slow and ponderous as a geological age coming on.

He doesn't feel cold.

He doesn't feel his body either—he feels the weaknesses and fractures in the pack ice, like they're his veins. He feels the shuddering vibration of ice moving against ice, stirred slowly in the vast tidal shifts of ocean currents like ice cubes bouncing together in a glass of bourbon. He can feel the _Valkyrie_ , like a splinter lodged painlessly in his foot. If he stretches thin he can feel the ocean itself, sliding vast and pitiless over his—his skin, his edges.

Time passes.

He doesn't sleep—sleep requires a physical body, a dream cycle, a meat and potatoes brain—but he _pays less attention_ , sometimes. Lets himself drift wider, looser, following thinner and thinner fractures into the ice or just letting the slow pulse of his awareness be pulled away with the ocean current. Lets himself be—less _Steve_.

Time passes easier like that—until the ice pops, loud as a shell exploding, or some bolt in the body of the _Valkyrie_ crunches as it sheers at last with the slow-shifting pressure of the ice, and it startles him into wakefulness—into Steve-ness. Snaps him to single-pointed focus and he remembers—

His name is Steven Grant Rogers. His mother and father were Sarah and Ulfadhir. He is a sorcerer and a soldier and a captain in the U.S. Army, a Howling Commando. There is a war on, and he should be—and people need him. But—

Sometimes he holds himself together long enough that he remembers putting the _Valkyrie_ down in the water, why he did it. And he doesn't regret it: he doesn't. Maybe this is purgatory—he made his choice with open eyes.

Sometimes he holds himself together long enough to remember Bucky Barnes, and then he _does_ feel regret. Christ, what a fuck up: of all the things he fucked up in 26 years of fucking up that’s the one that reminds him what pain feels like, the ache that runs strong and deep through the cracks and fractures in the ice.

Time passes.

He stirs, sharpens, when the salt-black ocean water pressed to his outer edges starts to hum and moan, distant and deep. It's a rising and falling song, slow and graceful.

He stirs and _listens_ , hears the singing come closer and closer. Alien, beautiful, a chorus of voices toning in harmonies that are—inhuman. Closer, and he stretches out a little, leaning toward the singing—

Whales. It's a pod of humpbacks—he remembers seeing ‘em from a plane once, somewhere over the Atlantic, a year or a million years ago: tiny sparkling grey and white against the vast blue of the ocean, the pilot flying lower so they could see ‘em closer, their scarred hides and the misting spit of their exhalation as they surfaced.

And now he's below the surface and watching them pass, a family group of maybe a dozen.

Through the water they look sleek and silver, and at least half of them are singing, vast and strange and sweet songs that make the water against Steve's skin hum and shake like a harp-string quivering in sympathy. The way their songs overlap and harmonise is—

It's like—James Place with his Mam, sitting at either end of the couch, both with their legs curled up and calves pressed together, and he's reading his comic and she's reading one of her dime novels—and _listening_ , hearing how their songs have slowed and blurred together at the edges, forming harmonies that rise and fall together, stronger and clearer than they'd ever be apart.

It's like _love_ , like home, and he's aching with the kind of heart-pain that's warm and sticky as honey—

—and it's only when all the whales fall silent at once, a gentle lull between the movements of whatever vast symphony they're performing—suddenly it's all quiet and—

And time has passed, and he's fucking miles away from his body.

He snaps back like rubber reefed out to its almost-breaking point, so fast and hard that he's dizzy, that it fucking _hurts_ , steel-bright pain surging through the cracks in the ice. He can hear the quiet shriek of ice sublimating to steam and then snap-freezing again a heartbeat later. It's—Jesus Christ, that _smarts_ , but—

But it's the furthest he's been from his meat suit, from the _Valkyrie_ , from the ice, in… in a while. A long while, maybe. Sometimes he forgets that he wasn't born here, suspended between life and death in the cold black.

Time passes.

The next time he hears whale-song, he follows them.

 

*******

 

It's easier to tell that time is passing, like this—whales breathe air, dive deep but mostly stay close enough to the surface that there’s daylight, sunlight, the passage of the sun across the sky.

He borrows with the whales just so he can feel sunlight on his skin—and that’s… a weird fucking experience. He's only ever borrowed with birds and four-legged mammals before, which is nothing on being a whale. The weight of the water, and the—the breathing out of your _back_ , and the sheer fucking size—if you could have the lived experience of being a tank or a city bus, maybe that'd come close.

So he's been following the whales for three days when they pass the fishing trawler.

It's brown and rusting and brutally unlovely with the reek of dead fish and guts, and it's also the most gorgeous thing Steve's ever seen because there are _people_ —real people, solid living people, a six-man crew of swarthy dark-haired fellas that don't speak a word of English. Not of any language he knows, and he's got a few now—French and Italian and German, a smattering of Russian.

He follows them for another couple days, borrowing with the gulls that follow the boat around in pursuit of fish guts, and then—

Land. Land, a harbour, a dock and a town: people.

He borrows with a stump-tailed dog—and he's got four feet on land, dry land, wind in his face, looking around: packed earth road winding out from the dock and then blurring out into the hilly terrain, rime of dirty ice on the buildings, construction is mostly packed dirt and brightly painted wood—no trees anyplace he can see, so that’s gotta have been shipped in: some kinda contact with the outside world.

And there's _people_ coming and going—he’s fucking breathless with it, giddy as a Goddamn schoolgirl. The stump where his tail ought to be is quaking side to side so hard his back feet keep lifting off the ground.

Quick recon later and he's got a few more details nailed down: it's a small settlement, fishing sheds and houses and a general store clustered near the dock and then scattered wide out into the surrounding hills. More of the same wood-and-sod construction; maybe a few hundred people, at a quick pass, almost all of ‘em dark-haired and dark-eyed like the fellas on the trawler.

He's been listening sharp, hoping for word of the war, some idea of what's happening on the front, but no one is speaking English—he hears singing and talk in what he figures must be the native tongue, and he’s heard snatches of a couple conversations in… He thinks it's one of the Scandinavian tongues, like Finnish, maybe. Or Danish.

The Atlantic Ocean is only so big. Unless the _Valkyrie_ was a Hell of a lot further off-course than he knew, it's a good bet he's in Greenland.

The general store is all wood panelling painted a rusty shade of red, and he waits at the door for someone to go in and slithers in after ‘em, dodges a kick and drops his ears flat, mission-mode, because if he can't get intel listening in he might be able to find something here—

There's newspapers for sale on a table at the back wall. The shopkeeper pokes at him with a broom and growls something—probably cussing—and he weaves around the broom head, climbs half into the display so he can get his shitty doggy eyes close enough to read the fine newsprint.

It's—

He can't read Danish any more than he can speak it, but—

But he can't miss the top of the page:

_15\. oktober 1957_

He's still staring, blinking hard and staring like some kind of asshole, like a stunned fucking mullet, when the broom catches him clean in the ribcage and—

There's a _crack_ like ice giving way and the world is spilling sideways and he's falling—

—and when he lands a heartbeat later it's to the crunch of bone, the shriek of metal sheering, to the darkness. He's back in the _Valkyrie_.

Back in the ice. Where he's been flash-frozen like a side of fucking beef for a little over a decade.

Time passes, punctuated by spikes of awareness and pain, the coarse edges of rifts in the ice grinding in and down like dull blades. It's been—details gets blurry in here, so it takes some concentration for him to pull up the memories, focus until they come into detail, do the math—it’s been twelve and a half years since he put the _Valkyrie_ down in the ice and—

And he's still fucking in here.

And he's alive and he's _awake_ and he's _still in here_ and—

Oh God, this is Hell. He's fucked it all up and now he's in Hell and no one is coming for him. Not after twelve years.

He—sheers. Splinters. Goes wide, into every crack and crevice, into the tug of the ocean against his edges, until names and numbers and time erode in the dreary grind of the dark and the cold.

Time passes. Somewhere in the guts of the _Valkyrie_ a panel moans, visceral and slow, and then _crunches_ as it pops open, welding torn by the inexorable weight and shift of the ice, and Steve snaps back together again.

If he had a mouth he could scream with frustration, but he doesn’t have a mouth—he's got his mind, his awareness, a little tattered with wear and tear but solid enough. He's got his memories, jumbled and scattered like apples from a basket, but they're all still there.

He can work this. He can think his way through this. And if not—well, this isn't actually Hell, hysterical tantrums to the side. Lord knows it could be worse, that he's made this bed for himself and it's probably nothing less than what he deserves for—everything. Everyone he's let down.

_Buck_ , he thinks, and then: _Ave Maria, gratia plena…_

It's the first time he's prayed in twelve years. It feels good—like his Mam's arm threaded through his as they walk home from the shops, like Winnie Barnes’ fingers carding into his hair as she gives him an overdue haircut. Like Peggy's warm mouth and breath on his face. Like a benediction.

Time passes, and the whales come again. Steve follows them.

 

*******

 

Here are the facts, as best as he can figure ‘em:

It's Greenland he keeps coming back to—it's the only land he can reach before he hits the end of his leash, the edge of his range. He borrows with whales, birds, searches out in all directions—but at some point his leash snaps taut and hauls his ass back to the ice. He can only go so far.

He's got a circle maybe 200 klicks in radius to work with: and within that circle, a whole lot of ocean, a whole lot of ice, and a chunk of coastal Greenland.

Within that chunk: one small settlement, a whole lot of snowy terrain, a fuck-ton of reindeer and ugly oxen, a fistful of seals.

Not a single bastard speaks English. Which just figures.

He needs intel: which means he needs to speak the language. Or understand it, anyway—there's not much call for him to say anything himself. It takes a few days of scouting before he finds the schoolhouse, and then another day to find the grey-brown cat living a couple hills over from the schoolhouse, and then—

The first time he walks the cat into the schoolhouse, the teacher chases him out with a ruler. And the second time, and the third, and the fourth. By the fifth she's worn down enough to just wave it in his direction, and when he settles under a table at the back of the room she sneers and then regally ignores him. He sits on his paws, tucks his tail around neat and tight, listens and learns.

By the end of a week he's spending the school day being passed from lap to lap.

The kids range in age from six to fourteen, boys and girls, all dark-haired and dark-eyed—and this school may be nothing like what he remembers of Brooklyn, growing up—there's no fucking desks, for starters—but kids are kids are kids, don't shut up, always talking and singing and chanting, rhyming games and clapping games, mocking and shrieking and howling with laughter.

It's a Hell of a language crash course—enough so that by the end of a couple weeks he can actually follow the lessons, kind of. Up to a point.

Which means he hears about the end of the war—they're calling it the Second World War now—in garbled chunks, piecemeal understood, a map up on the wall and Frøken Ketty, the teacher, showing the movements of men, troops, the front lines with broad passes of her hands.

The Allies won, Hitler is dead, and Japan has surrendered, all in the space of a few months in ’45. He missed the end of the fighting by a lousy couple of months. He hopes to Christ the other Commandos all got to go home, made it out of the meat grinder in one piece.

The year is 1959. He's lost more than a year to his tantrum in the ice, and then exploring, figuring out about his leash—but he’s not gonna lose any more time having hysterics, not if he can help it.

In his third week at the schoolhouse he's sitting in one of the girls’ laps, rumble-purring like a truck engine turning over and watching the kids rattle off the names of nations and capitals—in the exact same droning tone he remembers from his school days, rote-chanting off the times tables—when the fur down the length of his spine starts to bristle, stand on end like frenzied exclamation marks.

There’s a cold itch running over his skin, a liquid weight sinking in his gut, and he's got no Goddamn idea why. He's lost his purr, shifting, looking around, claws uncoiling to dig into the clothes of the girl he's sitting on, and he trusts his own instincts, trusts the cat’s instincts that something is badly wrong but—

But there's nothing, not that he can see anyway: kids, teacher, classroom, overcast sky outside—

Faint scent of rot.

The fingers tracing over the fur of his ears are—cold. Brittle, thin. Too thin.

He rolls his head back, looks up. The girl is—

Not a girl: a woman. Smiling down at him. She's pale, whiter than any of the kids here, ink-black hair tucked behind her ears, and one of her eyes is dead, blanched white and unseeing in its socket.

She's not—not one of the— _how long has he been sitting in her lap_?

Her petting hand is gentle and firm. Smile is lopsided, eyes studying like he’s performing for her entertainment. She looks—not human, not quite human. No one is looking at her, looking their way at all. This is—

A seeming. Or a veil. Something from his usual freak show, anyway. He's staring up at her, frozen, his fur helplessly arching up to puff out all over his body, and he's choking back the yowl that's trying to crawl up through him, and she's smiling and petting his ears and gazing at him with her one living eye. There's a maggot curled like a comma in the corner of her dead eye.

It's the final fucking thing, the icing on the cake, the _maggot in the eyeball_ , and—

Something snaps. Sounds like bone—

And then he's falling—sideways—faster than sound, faster than thought—

Slams back into the ice like he's hitting a brick wall, and if he had a body the impact would have shattered him, bone shards and chunks of meat marking a circle to show where he'd been—but he's bodiless, weightless. It’s his presence, his awareness that hits, like a bowl of jelly dropped off a tenth floor balcony.

He's distantly aware of the vast crack of the ice jolting and sheering, of the shriek of steam flashing and freezing solid again, of the pain, bright and searing as surgical steel.

It takes him a while to come together again, find all the smears of himself in the fissures in the ice and anchor them back in place: _Steve, Cap, Brooklyn, soldier, sorcerer, sketchbook, fireworks, tuberculosis, Bucky_ —

Steven Grant Rogers, Captain, O-5312205.

Okay. Okay, that was—what in the living fuck was that?

In the 26 years he was running around New York and the European theatre and everywhere in between he never once met another sorcerer. It was always just him and Ulfadhir—and he's always figured there must be others out there, hiding their lights under a bushel like he always has, so…

So, sorcery. Some kind of a working: an illusion or a veil or both—because sure as Hell no one else in the schoolhouse was seeing the part-rotted dame sitting in the middle of the room. Jesus Christ on a crutch.

He's got no way of knowing how much of what just happened was _real_ —cats are magic-sensitive, but not enough to hear the music. Not enough for him to hear the tune of the working and tell what kind of conjuring it was. It might have all been real and solid, only a veil working at play, or the whole thing might've been a tissue of illusions and fakery—

But who goes to that kind of trouble to ruin a cat’s day? But then—

But then a sorcerer would be able to know that the cat wasn't just a cat.

Lord Almighty, what a mess.

 

*******

 

He loses another year pulling himself together again, getting his—his suspenders straight and his hair combed right, all the scattered parts of his mind lined up neat and orderly—and then he's gotta wait for the whales to come back again.

He's tried striking out on his own, not waiting around to hitch a lift with the humpbacks as they come by—they must have some kinda migratory cycle, coming and going with the seasons—but he gets lost. No sense of direction, when you're not anchored into flesh. Christ, if he's not paying attention he loses track of up and down.

He can't go too far astray—because as soon as he _lets go_ his leash pulls him back to the ice—but he can't get anywhere either, blunders in circles over water and under ice; so he's gotta be patient, be strategic, wait for the whales.

They come, and he goes.

He checks in with the schoolhouse and the tabby cat first—all present and accounted for, all okay, no rotting women hanging around.

Which—it's not like he could fucking _do anything_ about it, if there were—he can’t work magic like this. Lord knows he's game, but the only weapons he has when he’s—stuck, disembodied, borrowing like this are doggy fangs and kitty claws. He could borrow a seagull and shit on the enemy from on high.

So it's a weight off his chest, that Frøken Ketty and all the kids are fine—a year older, struggling with puberty and mathematics, and fine.

He spends a couple days gathering intel again, hangs out as dog and cat and hare and gull at the docks and the stores listening to gossip and finding out what he missed in his year of being smashed jelly over ice.

Manages to squint at a couple copies of the world newspapers for sale at the general store—and he's picked up enough Danish by now to decipher the meaning some: there's a revolution of some kind going on in Cuba, and the Dodgers have moved to Los Angeles.

The first doesn't come as any kind of surprise—he learnt everything he knows about politics and strategy and the game of great houses from an immortal sorcerer. War is a natural consequence of humans coexisting just as much as inflammation is a natural process of the human body: it’s Godawful to live through, if you're lucky enough to live through it, but it's a shitty sort of inevitable. The Dodgers, though—

What a fucking betrayal. Bucky must be turning in his grave right about now.

Here are the conclusions, as he figures them:

He can't see a way out. Outta the ice, outta—all of this.

There's no telegraph station here, no typewriter—he’s scoured the settlement from end to end. He'd have to try and—what, longhand write a fucking message using cat paws? Or dog paws, or—and assuming he can the most likely immediate outcome is the poor fucking animal he's borrowing gets vivisected to find out what's making it tick. And even if he could—

Even if he gets the message out into the wider world he's got no idea who to try and send it to. Peggy, Howard? Assuming either of them survived the War, assuming the message could get to them, assuming they have any way to help? And—

Jesus, what would he _even say_? “I know I look like a cat, but I'm Captain America and I'm frozen in the ice, but I'm alive. Or I think I'm alive—I don’t know, actually, haven't had any sense of my own body for over a decade. Don't know the coordinates—follow the whales.”

No, that's—that is not happening.

He's not giving up. He's not gonna rest easy in his icy grave. But he can't see a solution right now either, so—

So, play the long game. So wait for the opportunity, the chance, for something to change, and keep gathering intel, and—and try not to go fucking crazy in the mean while.

If nothing else he's got a lotta faith in the US military machine: they invested millions in making Captain America, and sooner or later someone is gonna come looking for his corpse so they can pull him apart and try to reverse-engineer him.

Wait. Watch. Don't go crazy.

Right.

 

*******

 

There are a little over 400 people living in the town and sprawled out over the outer edges of the settlement. Maybe ten domestic cats total, and a couple hundred dogs—butch fluffy monsters that look about half wolf, to a city boy’s eyes anyway. There are gulls and foxes, lemmings, goats—plenty of animals to borrow with, borrow from, cycle between.

He doesn't want to stay in one place, in one form for too long—Christ, it would be too easy to forget, to lose the thread that ties him back to Rogers, Steven Grant. To just let himself be a dog, be a fox, be nameless, be no one—

He can't. He can't go down that road. He owes too much to too many people to just _quit_. Holds to the tattered threads of memories and stories, the things that make up a person, works over them in the night like rosary beads to make sure he's still got ‘em all: Steve Rogers, Captain, U.S. Army, sorcerer and spy, Howling Commando, son and artist and somebody's best girl. Don't you fucking forget.

So he keeps moving, shape to shape and body to body, every few days or couple weeks. Sometimes he's a dog in a sled team, and sometimes he's a fox, living on the very outer edge of the settlement, and sometimes he's a cat, a pet or a mouser, and sometimes he's a bird at the docks and he watches the boats come and go all day, in between scrapping for food with the other gulls, and sometimes—

Keep moving, don't get too comfortable, don't get attached.

Don't you fucking forget.

Stays close to town. He still needs intel, needs to know what's going on out there in the world, and for that he needs radio, the newspapers that come in by boat every few weeks.

There are reindeer on the tundra north and east of town, seals along the coast, a herd of muskoxen scattered about, but none of ‘em are keeping abreast of global politics and he cannot fucking lose that tie to the outside world, the world beyond this tiny bubble of ice and tundra, salt water and whale song.

Lord, it feels like he was born here, like he was birthed from the ice like Aphrodite from the sea foam, like he's never been anywhere or anyone—

Don't you fucking forget. Steven Grant Rogers, Captain, O-5312205.

Time passes.

In ’68 he’s a week into a borrowing with a cat, and when he wakes in the night the whole family are up and talking. He hitches a lift—climbs onto Miki’s shoulder, the eldest girl, and rides with her, his claws lightly pressed into the wool of her coat for traction.

The family treks over the hill and down to the schoolhouse, where the lamps are lit, tea is steeping, and the radio is on. There’s a dozen families here, crowding in, mounding blankets on the floor and settling in.  
There’s a lot of laughter and talking over each other, hard for him to follow with cat ears, and pouring tea and finding places to settle and—and then the boy closest to the radio yelps with excitement and everyone falls silent—rasp of fabric on skin as someone shifts, whisper of breathing—and the radio takes over.

The announcer is speaking Danish, and Frøken Ivaana is quietly translating into Kalaallisut, the local dialect, leaning in to the radio, her face lit up with a wild kind of smile: _“He’s climbing down the ladder now. He’s—it’s very slow, it’s like he's moving underwater, but he’s climbing down the ladder, and—”_ There’s radio silence and everyone holds their breath, and then—

_“Han er nede,”_ the radio reports, and Ivaana throws her head back and sings it out: _“He’s down, he’s off the ladder, he’s safe. There’s a man on the moon—”_

She's drowned out, everyone talking at once, laughing and grinning, the younger kids standing at the window and looking out and up like they might be able to see it happening in the night sky above them.

Jesus Christ. They’ve put a man on the moon. It’s something outta the wildest fever dreams of scientists and engineers, the impossible goal that everything else is measured against.

Howard Stark used to talk about it—how all the progress they were making in rocketry during the Wars had to be good for something, that humanity might get to space someday if they strapped someone crazy enough to dare it onto the back of one of those things—

Fuck. _Fuck._ Bucky would have loved to see this.

It hits like a Vernier rocket landing and Steve shakes half-outta the cat he’s borrowing with, curling in on himself to protect his guts because _Christ_ , Christ on a bike. That hurts. Buck, I’m so _fucking sorry_ —

Everyone is still talking and laughing, topping up mugs of tea and holding hands and he’s the ghost at the feast, unnoticed and unseen as he slips out of the cat and out of the schoolhouse, drifts out into the pre-dawn stillness. The sky’s starting to bleed into paler shades of blue to the east—nights are short this far north—and there are lamps lit in a few houses.

People getting up, people talking, people singing and people living their lives, growing up and getting old and sending rockets to the moon, and Bucky’s dead and mouldering in the bottom of a Goddamn ravine, and Steve’s—

They put men in solitary confinement to break them down. Steve is—

Is this what breaking feels like?


	2. Chapter 2

Here's the thing. If none of it matters—

The year is 19-Goddamn-68, and some crazy Goddamn scientists home in America have just put a Goddamn man on the moon, and Steve’s still buried under sixty feet of ice off the coast of Goddamn Greenland. He's drifting from borrowing to borrowing, and it’s all he can do to not just go crazy but—but if he can’t _change_ anything or _talk to_ anyone, and if everyone he’s ever known or loved is dead or has mourned him and moved on decades ago. He has to—has to assume that—

It's been twenty-three years since he put the _Valkyrie_ down in the Arctic Sea. And—and if someone was gonna come for him, they'da come for him by now, a dozen times over. The Allies won, the world is mostly at peace, there's no reason they can't get here, it's just—they must all think he's dead. Even... Steve used to pass some of the time dreamin' up rescue scenarios, painting himself as the damsel in distress and then the ice parts with a whir of huge machines and Howard Stark is there, or—or the ice melts away, shimmering curtains of steam, and then Ulfadhir helps him up like Snow White coming up outta her crystal casket—

It hasn't happened. It's been twenty-three years. They must all think he's dead. God, _Jesus_ —

So it doesn't _matter_ , and if nothing matters, then—

Then it doesn’t matter if he gets a little hazy some of the details, if he stops fighting so Goddamn hard—fighting to remember, fighting to stay human-shaped, fighting to be Steven Grant Rogers, Captain, O-5312205. No one is going to drum him outta the Army for it, kick him outta bed or shame him on the street for it—because no one knows he’s alive.

So, _fuck_ it.

He goes and borrows with the reindeer.

 

*******

 

Life as a reindeer: crop tundra shrubs for eight hours a day, move around the square mileage of terrain that this herd calls home, socialise with other reindeer—there’s posturing and rubbing together for warmth and company, rough grooming, sometimes a fight.

Sometimes sex; Steve bails out when that happens, finds another reindeer without romantic entanglements to borrow with. He’s an invert and a freak, a dress-wearing catamite pervert, but reindeer sex is a bridge too Goddamn far.

It’s boring but it’s easy—the pressures of reindeer life are immediate and tangible, and there’s nothing here to remind him of—everything. Everyone. The world he can’t touch, the people he can’t be with. So it’s dull as dishwater but at least it’s a different flavour of torture. A change is as good as a holiday, right?

He’s been with the herd for a little over a week when the wolves hit them.

He’s munching at a shrub when the reindeer next to him looks up, looks over, sharp and alert and—and he can hear it too, now, the sound of other deer in the herd, bellowing distress signals in the distance.

They’re a splinter cell from the main herd, a smaller group, only six of ‘em and—it’s too far to get back into the main body of the herd, form a defensive line: there’s no time. He can smell it suddenly, musky and rank with old blood—predator.

It moves through the splinter herd like a ripple off a stone thrown into a pond—sudden movement, looking up and looking around and recoiling and giving grunts and moans of alarm and—

The decision to run happens all at once—like they’ve got a group mind, like a flock of birds wheeling together in the sky flawless and fluid as dancers—and Steve finds he’s moving with ‘em, pivoting on his hooves with all the grace of a Sherman tank to run south, along the bank of the sluggish stream he took a drink from maybe only an hour ago.

Past the bellows of the reindeer, the pounding of soft hooves over coarse grass and moss and stone, he can hear the wolves now—their steady panting, rhythmic as the chugging of a steam engine, and sharp huffs and yelps—taking amongst themselves, coordinating their movements—

He lifts out, lifts away, shrugging away muscle and bone to let go and rise, like a hydrogen blimp cut adrift of its moorings, bodiless and lighter than thought, watching the reindeer pass beneath him. He can see it all better from up here: the terrain, the patterns of bodies weaving around and between, reindeer and wolves, torn chunks of moss and scrubby grass flicking up and out.

He’s only ever seen wolves once before: in a forest in Germany, sometime a million years ago. Heard movement in the night while he was on watch, went to check it out. He’d been quiet on his feet but they were quieter, mottled grey-black fur blending into the inky dark under the canopy—so it was not until one looked straight at him and there was enough moonlight filtering through the trees to see its eyes, shining flat gold circles, pinpoints of light in the dark and then—movement, half a dozen of ‘em, low slinking shapes moving deeper into the forest.

Timber wolves, is what Monty told him later; these wolves are different, smaller and leaner, their fur long and dense and frost-touched white.

They're zeroing in on the rearguard—the couple deer that have fallen to the back, old or injured, lumbering along that much slower than the rest of the reindeer. Steve drops to follow just above, close enough that if he were wearing skin he'd be basking in body heat and a gentle herbivore stench.

The wolves are not far behind, and—there’s nothing subtle about what they’re doing, it’s not stealthy. All the cunning must have been during the stalk, getting close—now it’s just about endurance. The wolves are chugging along steady and effortless as pistons churning; they’re not surging, not pushing. They'll run until someone drops.

He sinks down, hovers just above the last reindeer like a coat held open and overhead in the rain. It’s an old buck, the one he’s started calling Beans, an old man Steve’s borrowed with a few times now—the guy with the gentle ache in the girdle of his hips and the balding patches on his ass. He—

—drops, falls the last few inches and lands, gentle as dewfall, gentle enough that Beans doesn’t flinch or break stride, and then Steve is with him, legs and muscle and bone, feeling the ache in his hips deepen into burning as he runs—

Reindeer are not the hidden geniuses of the natural world: they don’t get a whole lot more abstract than maybe a sleepy kind of analysis of what the weather is doing currently or if there might be better grazing on the other side of the hill. So when Steve lands in Beans’ brain pan, he’s a rock dropping into a very still pond, and—

Steve’s not gonna take over. He doesn’t get to steer: doesn’t trust his coordination on four hooves at speed, not when it’s death if he fucks up, and not his death but death for Beans. So he doesn’t get to steer, but if he can help—he’s gotta help if he can.

He knows next to nothing about wolves, but what he does know is pincer manoeuvres—living room floor, Ulfadhir teaching him tactics with a seeming of Roman legionnaires and horseback auxiliaries and—and he drops that knowledge on Beans, like an egg rolling off the counter to hit the kitchen floor and spill information out fully formed and—

There’s a half-second hiccup and Beans’ stride falters— _oh fuck, I’ve killed him_ —and then Beans veers, hard right—

—and the wolf that was flanking to the right gives a startled yip and stumbles, almost falls getting out of the way, hoof flashing a half-inch from their skull and—

And still running, furry hooves churning chunks of tundra to paste but he’s out, Beans is out, the trap closes on nothing and Steve—feels lit up like the city skyline on the Fourth of July, like he’s done the _one fucking thing_ that meant anything in—God, in decades, and—

There’s a squeal somewhere to the left and—

It’s Dot—Dorothy, one of the younger dames, injured foreleg—one of the wolves is latched onto her left flank, teeth sinking into the meat of her thigh and—

Steve’s out and arrowing across to her, fast as thought, fast as—hits like a thunderclap and Jesus God, the pain arcing liquid hot up his leg—her leg, their leg—the wolf dropping away as Dot surges forward.

The second wolf is—hot fur pressed to Dot’s shoulder, rounding to her front close as breath, trying for—teeth grazing at their neck and Dot shoves, weight into it, clips the wolf away and—keep going, leg screaming pain and—

And white lightning again— _Christ_ —right leg this time, just beneath the bony mound of her knee, teeth meeting through flesh and dragging.

Oh God, this is— _Pater noster, qui es in caelis—_

Dot is—she’s on the same page as him, Steve realises—a moonlight-clear kind of calm has fallen over her mind, even as her body keeps moving, running, forward, endlessly forward over moss and stone and hillock until—

Left leg again, teeth clamping down like a vice, and she’s lurching, injured foreleg giving way like the seams on a cheap suit and there’s—third wolf, flanking to the front again, surging up to meet her as she staggers and—

Jaws clamping down on her neck, their neck, their throat—

Asthma, it’s like asthma, air just gone as sudden and completely as a light switching off, and she’s heaving, chest working desperately as she falls but it’s—

It’s over very quickly after that.

She’s writhing, they’re writhing, trying to get back up, trying to—the first wolf again, clamping down on her last uninjured leg and—and they are greying out, world going hazy at the edges—need to breathe, Jesus God, _need to breathe_ —

There are bursts of red and white pain punching through the haze and fading again but—everything is misting, getting soft at the edges, moonlight-calm welling up again like groundwater, drifting, rising—

And then Steve’s out again, lurching in midair like he’s drunk, just in time to see the last flickers of awareness go out of Dot’s eyes, and one of the wolves lunges in, bites down on the soft fur of her underbelly and hauls until the skin shears.

It’s a mess. It’s a Godawful mess. It’s a good thing Steve ain’t squeamish.

It’s—he hovers, pulls himself together, remembers where his edges are—Steven, Steve Rogers, Captain, O-531… 2-something.

There are three wolves here, crowding around to find a patch of meat—of Dot, _Jesus_ —to gnaw at. They’re small, not much bigger than a dog, white-grey fur and slender lines, muscle and bone and sinew pared down to the bare essentials. Red blood patters down from their teeth to spill over rock, stain the moss rusty.

When he was… When the _Valkyrie_ went down. He doesn’t remember a lot about the last couple minutes before he blacked out: remembers kicking, trying to stay afloat, remembers cold as sharp and awful as surgical steel and then the cold slowly seeping away, warmth creeping in. Remembers the welling sense of calm, like…

Like Dot was feeling. Like Dot felt as she died.

Jesus. _Jesus_ , what if he’s—

What if he’s fucking dead and he’s just too stupid to lie still?

What if he’s—Christ on a _bike_ —

—he always figured he was borrowing, like he used to do, like Ulfadhir taught him, but— _fuck_. What if he’s a ghost? What if this is what death is like when neither Heaven nor Hell will take your dumb ass in?

If he’s dead, then…

Then this is it, forever.

This is forever, and it doesn’t matter if he… if he remembers. It doesn’t matter.

When the wolves move out again, head east and north, Steve goes with them.

 

*******

 

There are five wolves in the pack, three adults and two gangling pups that’re still learning how to hunt, to fight, all limbs and yelping. He’s given them all call signs by the end of the second day—not names, he feels like they’ve got their own system of naming that involves scent and he can’t begin to get his head around it—but call signs.

By the end of the third day he has his favourites.

Now he’s—now he knows he’s dead, now he’s stopped fighting—it gets easier, being… like this. Gets easier to let time pass and just exist moment to moment, as a wolf. He’s a passenger most of the time, feels no need to jump into the driver’s seat: it’s enough to feel sunlight on his fur, snow under the pads of his toes, the scruff of a pup’s neck between his teeth. Enough to have this taste of life, of living. To be a witness.

Every now and then he uses what he can do to help: drift up and shift over to a sea eagle or a cormorant, get an aerial view of the terrain, scout ahead for prey, and then come back and feed the intel to the pack boss. But mostly he just… dreams. Lets himself be a wolf and forget about—borrowing. Sorcery. Being a sorcerer, being a… a person. Steve, a person called Steve.

It hurts less this way.

Every now and then he jumps ship in the middle of a hunt and… Look, no one is gonna pass judgement on him for this: the human world has moved on and God is clearly looking the other way—but he can judge himself for it. It’s ghoulish, is what it is, and he knows that, but—

Every now and then he shifts over mid-hunt and borrows with the hunted—muskoxen and hares and seals—and he just… stays with them. Until the end, until they kick and thrash and breathe their last, until the moonlit calm falls over them and warmth floods in and—

He’s never caught a glimpse of what comes _after_ , but—Jesus. He keeps trying, just the same. There’s a way off this ride, and he can’t quite reach it to grab on but he can brush it with his fingertips.

It’s not a mortal sin to want to die when you’re already dead.

It—he just wants to rest, sometimes. Just to put everything down and rest.

And when he’s not being pathetic, being maudlin, he’s a wolf. And the pups grow and the seasons turn and the muskoxen move around from grazing site to grazing site and life is…

Hard. Violent. Sweet.

Not his.

Once a year or so—he marks it by the length of the days: when they start to stretch out and out, daylight winding out endlessly, which means it’s summer and another year has gone by—once a year or so he goes back into town. Stays for a few days, as cat and dog and seagull, long enough to get a rough idea of what’s happening out in the world.

There’s another war, endlessly: this one in South-East Asia. There’s a television in the schoolhouse now, big and boxy. The American president, some guy called Nixon, is being forced to resign with some kinda scandal around spying or—or something, none of the papers Steve can find are giving any of the juicy details.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

He goes back to the wolves. He watches another pair of pups grow. He hunts and eats and sleeps, plays with the pups, mourns with the pack when the elders die, the one he’s been calling White Ruff and later her fella, George.

The daylight stretches out long and then closes up again, day in and day out, like the aperture of a camera lensing open and closed. The muskoxen move around on the tundra. The pups grow.

Time passes.

 

*******

 

He's been with the wolves for ten years, near as he can figure it, when the rotting woman appears again.

It's been so long he's half-convinced himself that he dreamed her, hallucinated her, something—but she's standing at the top of the ridge above the den, stark and clear against the landscape behind her like she's the only real thing and everything else is painted on, a flimsy backdrop. She's watching the pups roughhouse, a crooked smile on her face.

It's her again, it's definitely—getting a better look this time, now he can study her, now he’s not pants-pissing terrified: she’s milk-pale, holding herself like she’s about to strike a pose or throw a punch. Hair raven black and thick and woven in a rough braid. Dressed in a charcoal-grey suit, throat to toes and tight to the skin, like a dancer’s costume.

Half her face is flawless, and the other half is a livid wreck, bruise-smeared and blanched and puffy, the skin splitting and lifting at the corner of her mouth and eye. The rot carries on down one arm, fingernails looking ready to slough off.

He’s borrowing with Tuft Ear, one of the young fellas from the next-to-last batch of pups, and it’s easy as falling off a log to slide into the driver’s seat and take command: Tuft Ear is baffled, too confused to be frightened by—this. This apparition, this… being.

She’s staring straight at him: his first instinct is to drop low and try and get close without being seen but—yeah, not this time.

The stone and moss are cold under the pads of his paws as he approaches her.

When he’s maybe twenty feet out he stops, stands square so he’s solidly between her and the pups, between her and the den. She looks—refined, slender as an unfed ghost but she also looks like half her body is ready to slough off and the feeling of— _Christ._

He can’t hear the music in this shape—wolf ears aren’t attuned to it—but he can _feel_ something coming off of her in waves. It’s like standing next to a furnace, feeling the heat as a weight against your skin, but the feel of her is— _cold_. Pressure. The hairs along his spine are prickling up to stand on end. She’s a sorcerer, or something like it, no question.

So he’ll put himself between her and the pups. He’ll put—shit, sorry Tuft Ear—he’ll put Tuft Ear’s body between her and the pups. He’ll be the shield, as best as he can.

God, he hasn't missed his own body in decades, but— _fuck_ it would be good to have his magic where he could reach it right now.

He’s got fangs, claws. It’ll have to do.

She stands, watches, tilts her head gently to the side and smiles. It’s distant, a little strange—like she’s looking past him, like her head’s a million miles away, and the silence stretches out, unspools like barbed wire, clawing and pulling until her gaze sharpens, meets his and—

“Greetings, nephew mine,” she says.

He jolts like he’s been shot. Feels like an idiot, stills again.

“I can see the family resemblance,” she says, and he—

Slips a little, sideways—

Grabs onto Tuft Ear, latches onto a chunk of hair so he won’t—he can’t go back to the ice, not right now, he has to keep his shit together and _not_ —

Christ on a cracker. _Fuck_ —

He—yelps. If he’d had a mouth he could—a human mouth, a mouth capable of speech—but he can’t _speak_ , can’t shriek or ask the four hundred burning questions lodged in his throat like a fucking lump of unchewed pork knuckle sandwich. What _the fuck_.

“Oh, do you not…? Here,” the lady says, and then she’s in front of him—no travel time in between, quicker than blinking, and he doesn't even get time to recoil before she's grabbing him, fine-boned hands digging into the ruffs of fur on his throat and—

He’s lurching back, he’s staggering and he’s on two legs, he’s on _two legs_ , clutching at himself with hands and looking down and—soft white t-shirt and his navy blue skirt and skinny white human legs and Tuft Ear, standing next to him and looking up at him with a look of wolfish bafflement, which—you and me both, pal.

“What just—what?” Steve says, the first words he’s spoken with a human mouth in over thirty years, and looks up again—at the woman, the sorcerer, his—whatever she is, standing next to Tuft Ear and studying him with that strange smile.

“It is only a dreaming, but we can speak this way,” she says, and then, “You’re not the easiest creature to find, you know—” and she’s still speaking but—

Oh Christ, oh God, soaring through him and flooding into him like an ocean tide, like he’s going to fly apart at the seams of this spun-sugar dream-body she’s made: the music, it’s the _music_. Wolf song and tundra song, vast and ponderous and mossy and spiked with crystalline shards, bright and clear as daylight after half a year of pitch black night—

“ _Ohh_ ,” Steve says, the same kinda broken-open sound he makes when he’s clawing at the razor-bright edge of a white-out orgasm, which—he oughta be embarrassed, oughta hide his face in shame, sounding like that in front of a dame—but the _music_ , it’s the music. He could fucking weep.

It’s instinct, thoughtless grasping: he reaches out, reaches deep, goes for the fire—the fires of making and unmaking, coiled at the base of his spine like ball lightning, like sleeping snakes—but it’s like grabbing smoke, parting between his fingers and sighing away into open air.

“You can’t work _seidhr_ , not like this,” the lady says. “Not any more than I can. Not without a body.”

“You can’t—but you…” Steve says, and waves a hand at himself, and at some point he’s gonna get his shit together enough to construct a full sentence with this dreamed-up mouth of his.

“Not true _seidhr_ ,” she says. “This is merely a trick. Your belief is all that gives it substance.”

“Okay,” Steve says, patting hands over his chest and belly—it feels real enough, but now he’s looking closer it’s not quite right—no bruises on his knees, or fine hairs on his knuckles. It’s a human body as painted by someone not too familiar with the genre. But then—

“You said you’re my aunt,” spills out of him. “Are you—is Ulfadhir—”

“I have never met your father,” she says, and her smile grows, crooked: family resemblance. “He was not yet born when I was entrapped. But blood calls to blood all the same. Like calls to like. And you and I—we are both neither living nor dead.”

 

*******

 

She tells him to call her Heidr. It’s about as likely to be her real name as _Ulfadhir_ was—anyway, but then secrets and sorcerers are like catnip and cats.

She’s—not all here.

When he was Cap, Steve went whenever he could to the field hospitals, spoke to the men there, listened to their stories—sometimes of bravery, mostly of Godawful fucking misery—and sat with the dying. He’s spent hours at a time with men who were delirious with sepsis in some gut wound, or higher than God on morphine.

Talking with Heidr is like that: she starts and stops, loses track or jumps subjects, trails off and stares into space or physically disappears and reappears four feet to the right.

Piecing it together—it’s radio distortion, basically. She’s disembodied, same as him, not quite dead and not quite alive, and the piece of her that’s managing to talk to him is like a patchy radio transmission from impossibly far away. Her body is on another world—how the fuck, honestly—and it’s trapped there, and time and gravity and light all work differently there.

She looks—in her prime, vital—he wouldn’t dream of asking her age, his Mam and Winnie Barnes both would transcend time and space and death itself to wring his ear if he dared—but she speaks of _eons_ passing, so—so. She’s carrying her years well, that’s for sure.

“How can you travel so far from your body?” Steve asks. They’re sitting on the rock ledge above the den, never mind that his legs don’t need resting, that this whole body is spun of thought and light and can no more get tired than the sun can. Tuft Ear has moved away, is lounging next to the pups and watching them play fight, patient and put-upon.

“How can you not?” she answers, cocking her head. “You’ve shed the limitations of the flesh, but you’re still limited by distances within space and time?”

“I—yes?” Steve answers. “Is it—is it a spell, or a mental trick, or some kinda loophole?”

“Oh, baby wolf,” she says, and—

The explanation makes not a lick of sense. It doesn’t help that she keeps jolting out of place and time mid-sentence. It’s like trying to learn calculus via a series of surrealist paintings presented out of order, and then—

“Your perception of space as distances and finite measurements is—” and she's gone, vanished utterly, and Steve blinks, looks around and waits for her to reappear.

He waits for an hour before it’s clear she’s not coming back, and the dreaming—illusion—not illusion, body-thing she dreamed up for him is getting tatty and frayed at the edges so he shrugs it off, goes back to being a ghost, a thought on the wind. 

He drifts back over to the den, checks in—Tuft Ear, pups, all okay, the adults still out roaming—and he almost settles into one of the pups but—

But it’s been a while since he went into town and checked in, caught up. And—

And if what she said is true…

If what Heidr said is true, he’s not dead. Trapped, hopelessly fucked, but not dead.

So maybe it’s time and past time to start paying attention, start remembering again.

Steve, Captain, O-53—something.

 

*******

 

Time passes. Time passes, and the Soviets invade Afghanistan, of all places, and there’s a new Pope, and then—

There’s only one wolf pup in the last batch, and she doesn’t make it through the winter.

It’s always been hard—from when he first started borrowing with the wolves: their lives are _hard_ , scrabble to survive like he knows well, Brooklyn after the Crash hard. There’s never quite enough food, never quite enough rest. This is familiar—he knows all about this.

But time’s passing and it’s getting harder.

The muskoxen—there’s fewer of ‘em, spread further apart. There’s still hares, sometimes an unwary seal, rarely a reindeer that’s strayed away from the herd, but the oxen are the main source of food and—

There’s not enough.

The pup dies—Rosie, he’s been calling her Rosie.

Spring comes, and no more pups—it’s always been hard and it’s getting harder.

And then Heidr comes back.

This time she talks him through assembling a shape for himself—dreaming it up—it’s like when he used to scrape together an image in his mind’s eye before he’d conjure a seeming, only there’s no power behind it and at the end he twists it back on himself and—

“Christ on a cracker,” Steve says, looking down at his imaginary hands. They’re very still, very steady, like a marble statue: none of the minute traces of movement and pulse you get with living tissue.

“Excellent,” Heidr says, brisk. She’s sitting perched cross-legged on a rock, examining her nails for the last ten minutes or so while he’s been fucking about trying to remember what his body ought to look like.

“Okay,” Steve says, patting himself down: button-down shirt and pleated skirt, hair on his head that feels unnatural, slippery, like grease over silk. He turns to Heidr: “Okay, I didn’t know if you’d—I have a list of questions.”

She quirks her mouth into a lopsided smile, looks up from her fingernails. “Do tell?”

“For starters: you. You’re trapped, like I am, and—and impossibly far away but—if I get outta here, if I find a way out—is there a way I can get you out?”

Her face—she looks like the wheels have just fallen off her train of thought: eyes widening, jaw twitching, straightening and turning to face him directly like she’s seen God someplace in the snow behind his head. She’s frozen like that for a heartbeat, two, and then—

“And why would you do that?” she asks.

“I—because it’s the right thing to do?” Steve says. “You’re helping me, and—and you’re my aunt besides, but—mostly because it’s the right thing to do. No one gets left behind enemy lines.”

She stares a moment longer, wild-eyed, and then she stands up, walks over smooth as a dancer, grabs him by the face and kisses him on the forehead. “Baby wolf,” she says, and then: “I cannot tell if you are mad or merely hopelessly naive.”

“You’re not even the first person to tell me that,” Steve says. “Not by a long shot.”

 

*******

 

He can’t get Heidr out, is the long and short of it: there’s a spell holding her confined where she is, an uninhabited planet a million miles from anyplace, and the only thing that’ll break the spell is time.

“Conjured by my enemies,” she says, and then she jolts and flickers badly for a few minutes, maybe because of signal distortion and maybe to avoid his question about who those enemies are.

She’s half-dead because the world she’s on is dead, lightless and black as murder and clouds woven of acid and—“I could not survive it,” she says. “And so I drew together what power I could and worked a spell: what is dead cannot die. I wait. I endure.”

And that’s how she can find him, how they can talk: they’re similar enough that she can get through, signal distortion and all.

“So I’m at least kind of half-alive?” Steve says. “You’re sure?”

“If you were truly dead, the bonds of flesh and bone could not hold you on this plane of matter,” she says.

“Jesus Christ,” Steve says, and puts his head in his hands. “Mother of God.”

“I am Mother of none,” Heidr says, deadpan.

“Listen,” Steve says. “If I’m _alive_ then I need out, I need to get _out_ —” and she’s gone again, winked out like the picture on a television, and Steve gets up and lurches over, grabs at the rock where she’s been sitting like maybe she’s just veiled and if he can touch her he’ll—but she’s gone, really gone, and—

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Steve yells, loud enough that if this body had real meat and matter attached to it he’d have torn his throat, loud enough to shred the edges of his imagined form into ribbons.

 

*******

 

Time passes, and summer comes, and he makes his pilgrimage into town. The news from home is all bad: they’ve tried to put another rocket into space and it’s blown to bits in midair, killed the whole crew, and—was Stark involved, maybe? He’s shed a lotta memories along the way, but he remembers Howard Stark and rockets—and when he gets back to the wolves he can only just reach them before—

They’re moving. They’re moving—they’ve gotta move, the pickings are too slim, they have to try and find someplace else, gotta do something before hunger and sickness kill what’s left of the pack and—

They’re moving outta his range. He can’t follow where they are going.

Two hundred klick radius: two hundred klicks on his leash, anchored in the _Valkyrie_ , his frozen corpse buried in the ice. His world has never felt so fucking small.

He could _scream_ , he could fucking _cry_ , he could—he could force them to stay, could borrow with Beard the boss wolf and force him to keep them here but—but that would be criminal, cruel: they’ll die, they are dying, and their best chance to survive is to move on, and no one else should have to suffer for his sake.

He’s been with them for—God, he doesn’t even know anymore. Maybe twenty years? Long enough to watch six batches of pups grow up, long enough that all the adult wolves of that first pack are long since dead and gone, bones slowly shifting to powder against the snow and rock of the tundra.

Long enough—they’re family, is the thing, or the closest thing he’s got, they’re his fucking _family_ and now—

He stays with them—rides with Gertie, the pack queen, staying quiet and curled up in the back of her head just—just being with ‘em, being pack one last time—and when they pass over the invisible line that marks the end of his leash he lets the recoil pull his dumb ass all the way back to the ice.


	3. Chapter 3

He loses time again, being… scattered in the ice. Broken pieces of soul smeared out across and through like roadkill. It’s self-indulgent, and he needs it: he’s lost his pack, Gertie and Bones and Rufus and— _shit_. They’re gone, and he’ll never see ‘em again. His family, the closest thing he’s had to family in… in a very long time.

He can’t get drunk, or go to sleep, or fucking much of anything else to numb out, try and find a way to soak the pain.

He can’t get away from _himself_ , his stupid fucking feelings: feelings and thoughts and scattered shards of memory are all he’s got, all he is.

And then the ice shifts, and something creaks, long and slow and deep like a cello being tuned and—it’s the plane, the _Valkyrie_ , metal shifting somewhere deep in the ice. Down where his body is trapped.

Trapped, still, and there’s no fucking way out and—

His body is useless, is the thing. It’s a frozen pork roast. And _he’s_ useless, all talk and no action, because he can’t reach his magic, can’t work _seidhr_ like this: his power, the well of the fires of making and unmaking—they come through the body. Heidr broke it down for him, made that real fucking clear. So he—

Unless he—

Fuck. What if he…

Jesus Christ, what if—well. It won’t work, there’s no fucking chance it’ll work, but—God _Almighty_. What if it does?

 

******* 

 

He sinks into the ice, soaks into the ice like spilled whiskey into a tablecloth, dropping deeper through layers and cracks and filaments and—the _Valkyrie_ , he finds his way into the _Valkyrie_ , aware of the plane like…

When he broke his leg, a lifetime or an eon ago, the doctors gave him morphine and laughing gas before they set the bone, and when they did it he still felt the pain but it was distant, dulled, like it was going on in a curtained-off area of his brain. He remembers a grinding sense of pressure—and that’s what the _Valkyrie_ feels like, stuck in the ice: weight, pressure, wrongness.

Inside the _Valkyrie_ is pitch black—even in the depths of the ice there’s some light, split to fractals after making its way down and through layer after layer, but _some_ light. But once he’s pulled his all of awareness into the _Valkyrie_ it’s midnight on a moonless night and he’s navigating by feel, by the sense of pressure and presence: finding up and down, bulkhead, edges, metal and ice and pockets of dead air.

It takes a long time to find his body—too long. A day, a month—it’s almost impossible to track time passing when he’s not wearing flesh and bone.

He’s—his body—is wedged in a corner, meat bonded to metal and ice, and he knows it’s his—there was someone else on the plane when it went down, he remembers… something. There was a kid, a German kid—but this is definitely _his_ body because every time he brushes against it—

It’s a _pull_ , deep and unshakeable as gravity, like the base longing for skin on skin, and then a split-second later comes the pain, like cold fire lancing through him. Agony so bad he’d be puking his whole damn life up if he were embodied enough to have a stomach.

Okay, so… This is gonna be fun.

Once he kept all his memories like the beads on a rosary, neat and in order so he could work through ‘em, pore over them like a dog inspecting its own vomit but—but he stopped doing it, decades ago. It was sticking your finger in a belly wound, again and again, a sharp spike of agony against the background roar of miserable shapeless hurting. Now—

He hasn’t lost anything. Thought, memory: they’re all he is. Nothing is gone, it’s just been scattered, shattered, one too many times.

He doesn’t have a strand of beads anymore—it’s more—

Like a basket? A hope chest? Christ, it doesn’t matter what fucking symbol, none of it’s real—the pile of memories he’s still dragging around, all the detritus and broken off pieces of a life, a mortal life. God: it’s been a while since he looked too closely at—Lord _Almighty_.

He’s a Goddamn mess. This is worse than his bachelor’s washing pile.

He’s gotta hunt through the mess, because somewhere in here there’s a memory that’ll—try and find the right one for—

Oh—top of the pile: _Steve_. Steven Grant Rogers. Right, a name. His name. That’s… That sure is something.

But it’s not what he’s looking for, not the memory he needs, so—to one side. Keep looking.

He finds—

—his Mam is sitting at his bedside, her hand cool and fingers threaded into his sweat-damp hair, and she’s singing, something from the old country so he only catches a few words of the Gaelic—

—it’s like sorting through the laundry pile to find one sock in particular—

—he’s sitting on the rug upstairs at Dean Street, Georgie and Izzy sat to either side listening—reading ‘em a bedtime story, and he can hear Becca singing in the bathroom down the hall, smell wood smoke and soap and—

—nothing matches, nothing connects: it must have made sense at the time, but—

—fire, there’s—something explodes and his ears are ringing and everything is limned in red against the darkness, unreal, nightmarish, and—he’s forging forward, concrete underfoot and shield up—

—now it’s a mess, he’s a mess: all that’s left after decades in the ice—

—he’s crafting a seeming, painting it against the rafters overhead and— _Bucky_ , Bucky’s telling the story, and Steve’s doing the illustrations—his head on Buck’s stomach like a pillow—this is—they’re in a barn, in the hayloft of a barn south of Munich—there’s a dragon and a troll, in the story, and they’ve somehow fallen in love—

—ahh _Christ_. Buck. God, sweetheart, _I’m sorry_. That memory burns cold to the touch, an ache that runs up into the core of him like poison working up from a wound towards the heart. He sets it aside, keeps looking—

—Ulfadhir, pale hands elegant as he gestures, and then he raises one hand to eye height and opens it and: fire, white flame that’s almost invisible to the naked eye, writhing like a serpent in the palm of his hand.

Oh, here—this.

The fire starter spell.

When he lifts the memory clear of the pile, a snarl of other pieces come with it—like chains tangled in a jewellery box—he’s using the spell to light Bucky’s cigarette, behind a pub in London—he’s slapping at the flames licking up the kitchen curtains while Ulfadhir is doubled over somewhere behind him, howling with laughter—and he brushes them away, just: this. He needs this, needs to remember this.

He can’t work magic, not like this. He’s an observer only, no more able to affect the world than a ghost, like he’s on the far side of a sheet of bulletproof glass. But he can _imagine_ his sorcery, he can—how did Heidr put it? He can _dream it up_ , he can believe hard enough. And then—

His body. He can do sorcery when he’s in his body.

He plunges into the memory of learning the fire starter spell, soaks it in until he can smell the smoke and feel the heat of the flames against his hands, and then—

The first time he pushes back into his body, the pain is so blinding he fumbles the spell, fumbles—everything, name, purpose—he is screaming animal anguish, mindless, for maybe a whole heartbeat before his awareness ejects again and—

The ice is like a balm, clean, soothing. Silent.

It takes a long time to scrape himself together again. Too long.

And then: ready the spell again. Hold it, hold it _hard_ , front and centre of his mind like a prayer candle, like a shield. And then—

On the fourth attempt he manages to stay in his body for—count ‘em—six _whole seconds_ : long enough to feel the heat of the spell _flare_ , long enough for the ice pressed closest to his skin of his palms to sweat, liquify, a paper-thin layer of water between his body and the ice, before the pain eclipses thought and he’s out again but—

It worked. Holy Christ, it worked. He can do this.

More: he’s _gotta_ do this. It’s been decades, and he’s still frozen like a shoulder of beef—no one is getting him outta this one. Ulfadhir, Peggy, the Commandos—they've long since given him up for dead, so… Steve Rogers, self-rescuing damsel.

He picks himself up—scratches together the scattered basket of lost pieces, chunks of Steve that have rusted and fallen off the chain of links over the years. Readies the fire starter spell again. Pushes back in.

 

*******

 

He’s not in purgatory and he’s not in Hell—but who needs either of ‘em, who needs devils. He’s mastered the art of torturing himself.

His body—this sad and frozen thing, not quite dead and not allowed to die—icy slurry where his blood should be and meat hardened like oak. Every cell of tissue is a tiny concentrated centre of pain, distorted beyond recognition by the fluid swollen to frozen crystals inside, tearing at cell walls from within like diamond-sharp knives—and alive. Somehow, still alive.

The fire starter spell is shaped—it’s designed to light fires, but not burn the one who wields it so: the world around him warms. Slowly, so Goddamn slowly, like it’s taking centuries but it is happening: ice becoming water, metal heating, moaning as it distorts and shifts and expands.

And in the middle, he’s still a Christing ice sculpture: and it _hurts_. Every time he re-enters his body, it hurts, breathtaking, blinding.

And there’s no other way forward. Waiting to be rescued has got him a whole lotta nowhere; he can’t even die. It’s find a way out or go crazy.

Crazier.

Prepare the fire spell. Push into his body. Buck up and bear the agony of his miserable stupid frozen flesh for as long as he can stand it, long enough to let the spell do some good: soften the ice, send warmth in slow creeping waves through the metal body of the _Valkyrie_.

Eject from his body, screaming, writhing. Pull himself together.

Start again.

 

*******

 

Time passes.

 

*******

 

Time passes—only God knows how long—ready the spell, force back into the meat suit, hold spell and self together against the flaying pain, until self and spell fall to pieces and he’s out again—and it’s working.

He knows that it’s working because there’s water as much as there’s ice inside the metal bones of the _Valkyrie_. He knows it’s working because when he looks around it’s charcoal black, not ink black: there’s light coming in somewhere, light filtering through.

Later he knows it’s working because his corpse unsticks from the metal wall and sinks, slow as a wet week, through the icy slurry to rest on the floor of the plane. When he reenters his body after that there’s a new blaze of white hot agony all down that side of his body, the exposed skin that was frozen-bonded to metal howling white-bright pain.

It’s working.

And then later again he knows it’s working because there’s warmth in the _Valkyrie_ , coming through simpering and thin but _warmth_ —and it’s not from him, not from the fire starter spell: it’s sunlight. And then later, when the first razor-edge of black metal emerges from ice and into open air—

—it’s working.

Time passes, and there’s air in the _Valkyrie_ , air and fine slivers of light spilling into the plane through the seams and gaps where the metal siding has shrunk and grown and distorted in the decades under the ice, air slowly seeping in and water slowly seeping out and—

And then someone finds the plane.

And then someone finds him.

 

*******

 

He watches them oh-so carefully cut his body away from the remaining chunks of ice, put ice and frozen meat on a stretcher and crane-lift the stretcher up and out through a hole they’ve cut in the top of the plane.

He watches them load stretcher and body into the back of—it’s like the _Valkyrie_ in miniature, a sleek little grey and black plane, nose to wingtips long clean lines like razor blades. Inside is—it’s like an aquarium, a huge tank with glass sides and chrome everything and lights, displays. Tickle of memory: Stark’s expo, the World of Tomorrow: _I made it, Buck_ —

They load his corpse into the aquarium, and they freeze him again.

They—Jesus, he doesn’t know who these people are—there’s no insignia, no uniform he can see past the Arctic-layers of clothes and goggles and boots—they keep talking about _unregulated cryogenic state_ , and—they’re moving him. Someplace else, someplace—

“If we’re gonna do this—which, I don’t even know if we should, ethically: he’s braindead. But—if we do this we’re doing it safe, and slow, and in stages,” the guy who seems to be running the show says, and a couple hours later they’re packed up, crew crowding back into the plane and taking off again.

He’s out, but… This might be the frying pan and the fire right here. He doesn’t know what these people want.

 

*******

 

He’s watching over his body—

—and it’s not like he’s got a choice in the matter, not anymore. He’d like to be able to move away again, drift off into the winds and nooks and crannies, do some recon of this… this enormous complex they’ve taken him to, all labs and offices and clean white and grey architecture, chrome and computer displays of flashing lights. He’d like to go exploring, find out more: who the Hell these people are.

SHIELD, he knows that much, has seen it on the headings of memos, but that doesn’t tell him much—

—and he can’t. His leash is maybe only ten feet now: he can’t move away from his body anymore. Not since they started defrosting him—now his body is like a sinkhole, like a lead weight on the surface of the world, and all he can do is keep circling the drain.

It’s interesting to watch, at least: they’ve drilled dainty holes in the side of his neck and fed tubes in there, are pumping the blood in and out of his body through a big ugly machine: and it was icy slurry at first but it’s warming as it goes through and comes out again, warming. Slowly, so slowly.

A day ago his heart beat for the first time and one of the technicians jumped so hard she dropped a paper cup of coffee into her own lap, didn’t even flinch. Now his heart beats every twenty seconds or so: it’s slow. They’re feeding drugs in with the warmed blood, feeding oxygen in through a big ugly tube down his throat: slow, careful.

They’re not gonna autopsy him, dissect him for parts, that much is clear. They want him alive.

He just doesn’t know what else they want.

So he’s in the lab watching over his body when Heidr finds him again.

She’s not there and then she is, as sudden as blinking, ink black hair settling on her shoulders like it’s just been mussed by some great wind. She’s gazing at his body where it’s laid out on the table, gazing through him, past him, pensive.

“You are leaving the ranks of the Dead, nephew,” she says, and he—

His body _breathes_ —it does that now, has been doing it for the last couple hours: hauls in a breath outta synch with the machine that’s been doing the breathing on his behalf, chokes on the tube down his throat and—the technicians keep upping the dosage of the drugs they’re giving him but his freak metabolism is adapting quicker than they can keep up.

His body _breathes_ and his—his soul, awareness, the _chariot of his consciousness_ like Ulfadhir always called it—he writhes in sympathy as his body writhes, feeling the echo of a deep pain and pressure down his centre.

“We’re gonna have to pull the tube, he keeps fighting it,” Dr Redhead says, gnawing fretfully at the end of a pen.

“You’re not wrong. This guy—what did they do to him?” Dr Tiny Asian Lady answers, and then: “I’ll page Dr Sharma.”

Steve watches her go, looks to his body—settling as they drug him again—and he’s—drawn. Drawn, like gravity, like he hasn’t been since before the ice. He’s gonna live, and if he lives he’s gonna wake, and he’ll be…

He’ll have to be Captain Steven Rogers again.

Heidr is next to him, swift and silent as moonlight, and he dreams up a body and a mouth, hauls it together in double-quick time so he can grab her by the wrist and blurt out: “Heidr, I don’t—I don’t know how to do this anymore.”

She blinks, slow, easy, turns away from studying his body to look at him like she’s moving underwater. “How to do what?”

“How to be a human,” Steve says, helpless.

Heidr smiles at that—lop-sided, half her face dead tissue, unshifting. “I don’t have an answer for that,” she says. “I have never been human.”

“You couldn’t have tried to say something comforting?”

“I don’t peddle comfort,” Heidr says. “I deal in truth.”

“They’re gonna wake me up and expect me to be— _somebody_ ,” Steve says. “And I’ve been ice floes and wolves and sea gulls and Goddamn reindeer for—Christ, I don’t even know, decades—”

“It’s the weight of their expectations that burdens you? Are you not a warrior- _seidhkonur_ , of a line of warrior- _seidhkonur_ s?” Heidr says, turns all the way to face him. Her other hand, her dead hand, comes up to cup his jaw. He can smell—imagines he can smell—the faint sweet scent of rot. She meets his eyes for a moment, cool, assessing, and then her hand bites into his jaw and gives him a shake. “Stop whining.”

Steve stares at her for a heartbeat, and then he laughs out loud. “Jesus,” he says. “I can really see the family resemblance.”

 

*******

 

They watch together as the doctors confer, study his vitals on the half-dozen displays, come to a decision: they’re pulling the tube. “Oh God,” Steve says, feeling that shadow edge of pressure and wrongness inside him, and Heidr gives his hand a squeeze.

“Stop whining,” she says again, absently, and her hand stays in his as they watch: as the doctors feed his body another big dose of drugs, as they ready the next breathing machine that’ll take over once the tube comes out, as the head guy—Dr Sharma—ties a mask on and gloves up.

“Here goes,” Sharma says, and then he’s pulling and Steve is being sawn in half, clawing pain running up and through him like he’s swallowed razor blades and they’re coming back up with interest.

It happens fast after that. One of the techs is taking the tube, swabbing the pus and bloody phlegm from the end of it with a pinched look of disgusted fascination; another is strapping the mask of the new breathing apparatus across his face and—

His body breathes. Again. And then again.

“God,” Steve says, breathless somehow when he doesn’t even have lungs, have breath—the pull to his body is tidal now, almost irresistible. “God, I’m not ready.”

“Must I say it a third time?” Heidr asks, and then: “You wanted this.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I—yeah. I guess I did. Jesus, okay.” He lets go of Heidr’s hand, lets go of the dreaming that’s giving him a body shape, lets himself go soft at the edges. Drifts forward.

Looks back to Heidr. She’s watching, narrowed eyes and tight around the mouth like she’s thinking. “When you return to the living world—if you meet your grandfather. Tell him I’m coming, and he needs to get out of my seat.”

“Okay,” Steve says—clearly some family reference that’s flying above his head—and then: “Thank you, Heidr. Aunt.”

She smiles, and he turns again, and his body is right there and he’s falling—

 

*******

 

Waking up without pain is—alien.

He’s… he’s on a bed. He’s big, he’s in his Cap-shape; dressed, soft clothes. He lies still, keeps his breathing steady and slow, keeps his eyes closed: small room. Radio playing. Window open—he can hear the curtain moving against the windowsill, but—but the air smells canned, recycled, and he can hear a fan churning in the distance. The radio—

It’s a baseball game, crackly like—like radio hasn’t really been in decades. Old recording? It’s—

Jesus, it’s a Dodgers game. That is old.

Fly ball—1941. May of nineteen-forty-fucking-one. They hit the archives for this one.

Okay, so: he’s on a set. He’s done his time on stage, in movies: this is fakery. Christ, the paint on the walls still smells fresh.

Whoever these guys are, they don’t want him to know where he really is. _When_ he really is.

Okay: scene set. Roll camera.

Steve opens his eyes, sits up on the bed, looks around: lots of beige. Furnishings are neat, sparse, old fashioned—old as he is. Past the radio he can hear the shrill wail of electronics behind the walls: cameras are tiny now. He’d seen a film crew in Greenland with cameras small enough to hold ‘em in your hands, and that was a couple decades ago. Safe to assume they’re even smaller since then. Safe to assume he’s being monitored.

The door opens—it’s a dame—shit, a _young woman_. She’s—

Red hair in soft curls, loose, like she’s going on a date. Man’s tie. Her blouse—God, he can see her bra right through it. It’s a modern soft-cup number, nothing like the brassieres he used to quietly pine over back in the day—if only he’d had tits enough to wear ‘em. It’s 1940s ladies wear through a funhouse mirror, and—

Either they’ve made only the most half-assed attempt at research for this facade, or this is all a test.

Jesus, when is it ever not a test?

“Good morning,” the redhead says. Wastes a smile on him and makes a show of checking her watch. “Or should I say afternoon—”

“Where am I?” Steve asks.

“You’re in a recovery room, in New York City,” she says, lies—he can read it in the flick of her eyes, the slight tension around her mouth—

“Let’s try again,” Steve says. “Where am I really?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand—”

“This is a set,” Steve says, points at the radio: “That’s a recording. Your research team really screwed the pooch on that one: I was in the stands for that game. You are an actress, or a spy, or both, and either way you’re not getting paid enough, because you’re gonna let me out or lemme talk to the guy in charge, or I’m gonna make your job a Hell of a lot harder than it oughta be.”

“Captain Rogers,” she says, mildly, like she’s Sister Mary Catherine catching him drawing in his workbook again, and then he stands up—uncoils to all of his six-plus feet of height—and she flinches back half a step and hits the button she’s trying to hide in her hand.

Okay: time to exit, stage left.

He strides at her, at the doorway—and it’s bursting open again, goons coming in and—black, head to toe. Helmets. Body armour, rifles—shit. If he didn’t know better he’d say this was Hydra.

They haven’t gone to this much trouble and expense to shoot him now—ignore the rifles and plough straight into ‘em, knock ‘em flying like human skittles and he’s past them, he’s out—

Corridor, grey and cold and nothing like the painted-on pleasantry of the recovery room, and—he takes a second, listens for—sound proofing’s good but he can just hear a car horn blaring somewhere to the left so—

Cut left and _go_.

“ _All agents, code thirteen_ ,” comes over the speakers overhead—it’s the redhead’s voice, the actress, so _code thirteen_ means _him_. Means he’s gotta move fast before they close the trap around him again—runs like his ass is on fire, and there’s—

—“ _I repeat: all agents, code thirteen_ —”

The corridor branches and there’s people, men and women in dark business suits and sensible shoes, turning to watch or moving like they’re gonna engage or tripping outta the way and—keeping running, corridor branches again, out into some kinda foyer and—there, double doors, daylight—

It’s—he’s on a street—

Street, cars, people and—and he’s—

Sometimes when he was cat-shaped he’d be in a house while they were watching a movie, one of the few houses in the settlement with a television. He’s seen glimpses of city streets and cityscapes, set dressing for whatever romance or action film: glimpses of the new world outside of the tiny wedge of tundra and ice that he’s—

He’s seen glimpses. He knew in his head that the world has changed. 

Knowing it in his head hasn’t prepared him for this.

There’s a lit up moving sign—it’s a screen, an enormous screen like a television but—and it’s a hundred feet high, covers the whole side of a building, and it’s—it’s one of dozens. Jesus, everywhere he looks is lit up and moving in Technicolor and—

Cars. There’s a hundred cars right here, and a hundred more just up the street, all low-slung and sleek and—their exhaust smells different, weird—why are they still making exhaust? Bucky and Howard Stark were promising him electric cars however many decades ago—

And the people, God—

Everything is—bright lights and car horns blaring and the burnt smoke reek of street and city and—

Jesus God, this is Times Square.

It’s—he’d recognise it anywhere, this meeting place of street and building, the shape, the bones of architecture under the skin of flashing lights and sound. This is Times Square: he stood here last in 1943, sketchbook under his arm and pencil smudges on his hands and shirt cuffs, and now—

Guess the actress wasn’t lying about everything: he is in New York.

“At ease, soldier,” comes from behind him, and—

Steve turns, blinks: a matched set of big black cars have muscled into the street, form a half-circle behind him. Cut off escape? There’s more goons in tactical gear, goons in suits, and—and to the front—

Tall, black, eye patch, air of command— _this_ guy. Steve remembers him: he came by the lab every couple days while Steve was defrosting like a chicken thigh on the windowsill. Checked progress, asked questions, looked inscrutable as a Goddamn sphinx. This is the guy in charge: the doctors called him _Director_. Steve squares up, faces him, waits.

“Look, I’m sorry about that little show back there,” the director says. He’s shaved clean bald, chin and scalp, long black coat. “We thought it best to break it to you slowly,” and Steve has to swallow a laugh at that— _Jesus Christ_ on a _bike_ —

“Consider the news broken,” Steve says. “What year is it?”

The director blinks, nods slowly—not the answer he was expecting, not the reaction he was expecting. “It’s 2012, Cap,” he says. “Welcome to the 21st century. You’ve been asleep for almost seventy years.”

And Steve has to bite back another laugh, because if he laughs it’ll turn into a sob, he just knows, and he _wishes_ —Jesus _Harold Christ_ —he fucking _wishes_ he coulda been asleep all that time.

He’s out. He’s out and he’s home—and what in the _living Christ_ is he _meant to do now_.

“You gonna be okay?” the director asks, and—

“Yeah,” Steve says, lies, automatic as blinking. Takes a breath and straightens his spine and touches his sternum, pulls all the scattered pieces of himself into his centre like Ulfadhir taught him seventy-something years ago. He’s got this.

He’s gotta fucking got this: there’s no other option.

Hauls his face into some kinda expression—some kinda cocktail of curiosity, wonder, confusion, like a normal person would feel at a time like this—and makes firm eye contact with the director of SHIELD and says: “So, what did I miss?”

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here ends the interlude!
> 
> Next part will cover Steve vs the 21st century, and the long-awaited Loki vs the Avengers (with Steve running around in the backdrop of every single scene whisper-screaming 'hoLY FUCK DA WHAT THE FUCK').
> 
> So, good news: it's gonna be fun. Bad news is it's still a WIP, and after some back and forth about how I wanted to do this thing--whether to just write and post as and when I can and take as long as I've gotta between chapters, OR write the whole damn thing and only start posting once I'm done--I've settled on the second option. Gives me more opportunity to reverse-engineer in fixes in previous chapters when Steve or Loki do some trickster shit and pull canon down to rubble and ash all around us.
> 
> All of which is to say: I've been posting once a week, regular as clockwork, and that stops now. Shouldn't be a long hiatus--I'm already about halfway through the next arc. So once it's good and done, I'll start again, same kinda schedule. Subscribe or bookmark so you can find me when that happens :D
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey: we took a hard-right into bat country and y'all stayed the course. It's a joy and a delight to write for you, and to hear back from you all <3
> 
> See you in Part Three!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [ART - Roof of the Wave](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13649310) by [jazzy2may](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzy2may/pseuds/jazzy2may)




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